Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1) (13 page)

S
PACE

B
ack in my makeshift lab
, I studied the contents of the folder Hank Dobo had given me. Looked through the names of the high-value slot players he had given me, didn't recognize any of them. I plugged in a flash drive from the folder and started watching video of the people who had won significant jackpots on any of the hacked slots during the timeframe of interest. All the cameras in the high-stakes areas were 4K resolution, so the quality of the video was remarkable. There were several dozen different people, a mix of men and women. Reaction to their wins varied from ecstatic jumping around, to subtle fist pumps.

What was a Hornet driver doing working in casino security? Most of the guys who fly fighter jets are so eaten up with flying that they don't want to do anything else. And they're so good at it, they can get any job they want in the private sector.

I played the video again. And again. And again. After an hour of this, I had something. I'm not a gambler myself—not anymore—but I have some insight into those who are. Frequent gamblers are addicts, always chasing the high of the next win, and this has to be doubly true with those who play for big dollars. Casinos treat these people like kings and queens because they want them to keep gambling. If you keep gambling, the house eventually wins. It's not luck. It's math. The casinos want them to keep gambling, and they do keep gambling. That's why I kept seeing a lot of the same faces on the videos. But there were several I saw only once. Not impossible, but outside the norm. A few people will make a big score and walk away, but most people who hit a $25,000 or $50,000 jackpot on a machine would keep going. They'd want to do it again. And because they sit and feed these machines absurd amounts of money for days on end, they usually do have several big wins.

After all the watching, I focused on three people. One man and two women. Each of them appeared just once. I cobbled together a quick edit of just those three, and put it playing on a loop. The loop was a little under three minutes. I watched it dozens of times. Memorizing. Absorbing. The way they sat. The way they pushed the buttons. Where they put their feet. How they scratched an itch. How they celebrated their wins. I became one with each of them. Then I composed an email to Hank Dobo the Hornet-Driving Casino Security Chief.

O
VER THE ATLANTIC

C
hristine Gamboa

O
ver the past
twenty-four hours, Christine had listened and talked through numerous phone calls between Sasha, Zuyev, and her. Their plan for going to the FBI and cutting a deal was coming together. It was complicated, all the schemes and lies the two men had concocted to shift as much blame off themselves as possible and onto Max and his henchmen. Henchmen other than Zuyev and Sasha, anyway. In addition to the lies themselves, Sasha had been busy creating evidence to substantiate the lies. He apparently had a whole network of people willing to create any kind of document imaginable, willing to testify to anything, willing to do anything. She wished she had never met any of them. She wasn't like them. Sure, she took their money. Who wouldn't? But there was a hell of a difference between getting somebody into a computer network, and doing the kinds of things these men did.

She was exhausted from the mental effort of participating, from walking the line between being forthcoming, and being too forthcoming about what she knew. She wanted to pull the window shade down, recline the jet's comfy leather seat, and crash. Sasha, unfortunately, wouldn't shut up.

"Chrissy, you must not to trust Zuyev. He is bad man."

Gee. She would never have guessed. Thank God she had Sasha, such a good man himself, to educate her. "I know, Sasha. I won't."

"You must to never go alone with him."

"I won't."

"I cannot to protect you if you go alone with him."

"I know."

He nodded his big head and said nothing more. Christine pulled her shade down, pressed the button to recline her seat, and pulled the little blanket up under her chin. The ride was smooth, the jet engines just loud enough to provide perfect white noise for sleeping. As she started to drift, she cycled through the things she knew, things she had to remain constantly cognizant of in order to stay safe. Based on what Sasha had told her, Zuyev was a bad man, a brute, a classic thug in every sense of the word. Max was black-souled evil. And Sasha, while a criminal, was a better man than she had given him credit for. He also had no idea what was really going on. He thought he did, but he did not. Zuyev, and hopefully Max, thought she was likewise ignorant to the truth, thought she believed this whole thing to be about breaking into computers and stealing money.

They were wrong.

S
PACE

I
shut
down my work computers and stood for a few minutes looking out the window of my workroom. It was late in the day and I loved the way sunlight transformed into a soft golden hue and cast shadows with feathery edges. From this perspective, Vegas was beautiful, with its tall buildings bathed in amber, along with the mountains that ringed the valley. When I was done soaking up the peace, I pulled a flash drive from the computer I'd been working on and dropped it into my pocket. Time to visit Hank Dobo again.

After an elevator ride, I walked to the door labeled SOC—I guess they don't want the uninformed to know when they're walking by the Security Operations Center—and watched the glass-looking door handle turn green when I touched it and my bracelet's credentials were accepted. The techs never looked up as I passed through the room on my way to Dobo's office. I rapped on the frame of the open door and he motioned me in.

"Hey, Flatbread," Dobo said, his hand out.

I shook it and said, "If it's all the same to you, how about sticking with 'Sam' instead?"

He shrugged. "What's up?"

Taking the flash drive from my pocket, I handed it across his desk and sat down. "Can you put that flash drive’s content on that monitor?" I pointed to a large panel on a side wall.

When he had the video up and running, he said, "What am I looking for?"

"Let it play. I'll narrate." The video started with a still shot that used a split frame to show the two men and one woman who'd attracted my attention during my watchathon. "These three faces only appeared once, which made me curious. So I studied them." The video cut to the first guy, switching between camera angles and showing him from a minute before his jackpot to a minute after his little celebration ended. Then parts of it played again, this time slowed down and annotated to highlight certain movements. After that, the view switched to a different man and the same basic sequence repeated itself.

When the sequence finished playing, Dobo paused the video and looked at me. "Sonofabitch. Same guy."

I nodded. "Unless both men just happen to use their middle finger to scratch their left ear in exactly the same way, yep, same guy. Play the rest of it."

Dobo resumed the video and the same thing played out with four more men. "Crap," he said. "Six times he hit us." He paused it again, stood, paced a bit.

"I call him The Itch. He's the most obvious, but when you watch the rest of the video, you'll see that there are two more 'morphlings,' another man and a woman. They were also sharp enough to never give the cameras a great view of their faces, so I'm not sure your facial recognition system will be much use, unless you want to get a graphics expert to try to use all the different angles and partials to compose a frontal view."

He nodded. "I'll work on that."

"Okay," I said. "I'd like to know if you identify them. Keep me posted?"

Dobo said, "I'll do that."

S
PACE

B
ack in my suite
, I showered and sat down at the glass desk to check my email once more for the night. While the laptop powered up, I ran my finger along the smooth edge of the glass and tried to spot the tech that made just the edge glow in an ever-morphing range of colors. I was ready to stretch out on the bed and find a movie to watch. Then I saw the email at the top of my inbox with the now-familiar subject of CONFIDENTIAL AND URGENT: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION. I clicked into the message.

I
read it again
, my blood sizzling through my veins and arteries, my heart pounding so hard I could feel the pulse in my neck. That bitch. That low-down, bottom-feeding, ass-sucking bitch. I slammed the lid on the laptop and stood, sending the desk chair wheeling across the marble floor before it bounced off the coffee table. After walking to the big window, I stood looking at the expansive view of Vegas for a good ten minutes, my mind working. My first instinct was to call my ex-wife and tell her about it, but it was late and there was no need to ruin her night, too.

She couldn't do anything about this anyway. This was all between me and a petty bitch in Manhattan. I placed my palms flat against the cool glass and willed my heart to slow, taking long deep breaths. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Back in control, I forced down the urge to call Meyer and explain to her what a life-changing mistake she had made. Always better to show instead of tell.

S
PACE

"
T
his is outstanding work
," Jacob Allen said after I brought him up to speed the next morning. "I see why you're expensive. I have to say it concerns me that an outside consultant with no experience in casino security found in a day what our people didn't find in weeks."

"Not sure that's fair to Dobo," I said. "Not my call, though."

"How much?"

"According to the logs, over a three-day period, they hit jackpots of almost a million bucks."

"Against what kind of input?"

"That's where it gets really interesting," I said. "Once I had these narrow timeframes to work with, I was able to get far more granular with my digital inspection of the machines. The nut is that the combined input for all these wins was six thousand and change, but—"

"Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and all the apostles! How is that possible?"

"The moment before they pushed the PLAY button on each and every one of these jackpots, that machine was set to a payout rate of virtually one hundred percent. The software won't allow a rate of a hundred percent, but it will allow ninety-nine and a whole bunch of decimal places. A win was all but certain on every occasion. And the moment the win was registered, the machine dropped back down to its normal rate. The ultimate in rigged games."

He sat, shaking his head several times before looking up. "Where are we on identifying these people?"

"That's in Dobo's hands. I'd like to continue my current track of investigation. This is just what I spotted in a day. There could be more."

"You have carte blanche. Proceed how you see fit."

I nodded, thanked him, and left the room.

I
spent
the rest of the morning back and forth on the phone between Abby, my ex, and Paul, my attorney brother. Abby was completely freaked. Paul was getting up to speed and looking for the right immigration lawyer. I was settling into a mode of quiet determination.

Ally had to be gotten out of the horrible situation she was in back in Russia all those years ago. She was at danger daily of being molested, or sold, or worse. After a year of Russian bureaucracy and bribes and begging going nowhere, I took her from the orphanage in the middle of the night and disappeared. I did what had to be done, because that's who I am. I don't regret it for a moment. Would do it again a thousand times. But now someone was trying to use a bloated bureaucracy to exploit what had happened, to take advantage of the salvation of a little girl.
My
little girl.

After all the info had been exchanged and everyone was up to speed, it was time for me to get back to work at SPACE. I could have an expensive legal battle ahead.

S
PACE

B
y mid-afternoon
, I'd found a couple more players and handed them off to Dobo. My eyes were burning from watching video, so I switched my attention to finding out exactly where the machine adjustments had come from. After studying a lot of data, I had ruled out Gamboa's devices. She was somehow involved in all this, no doubt about that, but she wasn't the one tricking out machines to offer near-guaranteed wins at precisely the right moment.

The adjustments were, however, coming from inside the SPACE network, from the same computer every time, and that computer was likely in the same location every time. I knew this because of numerical signatures that are attached to computers and network locations. It was a start.

The problem? According to every bit of data I had from Rose and his IT underlings, the network location of that computer shouldn't exist on the SPACE network. Their network diagrams showed all the various subnets (“roped-off” smaller networks that combined to make up the larger SPACE data network), complete with the appropriate numerical addresses assigned to the devices inside each subnet. For example, each computer had a unique address, as did each EGM, each network printer, each data device of any kind that was connected to the company's network.

But the computer that made the adjustments, which I had taken to calling the "HCC," for "Hackers' Control Computer," had an address that was nowhere to be found among the diagrams. Its address shouldn't even be possible, because it was part of a subnet that, on paper, didn't exist. Imagine you're standing in front of a house at 123 Coyote Avenue, in Acme, Arizona. You know the house and the address exist, because you're looking at it. Yet when you pull out your smartphone and search for the address on Google Maps, Google tells you the address (HCC) doesn't exist. In fact, it tells you that Coyote Avenue (the subnet that HCC sits on) doesn't exist at all. That's where I was.

"Hey, Jimbo?" I said.

Nichols looked up from his Kindle. "Yes, sir?”

"Who could get me a set of architectural drawings for SPACE, all of it?"

He squinted his eyes for a bit. "Bert Addison. His title is Station Manager. Should be your guy."

"Thanks," I said. "Go back to your book." I pulled up a directory from the SPACE Resource Guide on the company intranet, found Addison, and shot him an email. Looks like Jacob Allen had spread the word well on cooperation, because I had a response back in a couple minutes. He wanted to know what kind of drawings I wanted. I told him to give me everything and I'd sort it out. Within five minutes, I had a big .ZIP file full of drawings. Maybe I should have narrowed my request.

It took a while to figure out what I had, and even longer to learn how to interpret the various symbols and labels, but I got to what I wanted, which turned out to be an elevation multiview that showed a wireframe rendering of the physical structure, overlaid with a network diagram. Actually, there were several of these, one for each major component of the SPACE complex. I strongly suspected what I was looking for would be in the central building that housed the casino and hotel, so I started there.

I moved from my laptop to one of my desktop machines, so I'd have a couple large monitors side by side. On the left, I brought up the master network diagram from IT. On the right, the wireframe architectural drawing. Looking back and forth between the two, a coherent mental image came together for where the various network locations were in the physical world. The IT diagram matched up perfectly with the wireframe, which is to say I still had no idea where the Control Computer or its mystery subnet were. I repeated the process for the shopping complex, the space museum, the entertainment area, and every other structure of the physical world of SPACE. Same result.

Back to the beginning. I pulled the wireframe for the casino-hotel back up and adjusted the view so I could see the entire drawing on my screen. Nothing. Well, almost nothing. This tidbit didn't provide me any information about the location of the Control Computer, but it was a curiosity, and when I encounter oddities of any kind in a difficult investigation, I pay attention. At the very bottom of the casino-hotel structure on the wireframe, which I hadn't paid much attention to during my first study of the wireframe, because the basement had little in the way of data networking, a section of the building was highlighted in bright yellow with an overlay of faint, diagonal red lines. By “bottom,” I mean below the basement, which put the area at least a couple stories underground. The highlight depicted a pair of rectangular central areas, surrounded by an array of corridors and smaller rooms. One of the corridors connected to a tunnel that angled up to ground level. Emblazoned in bold black text across the highlighted area was a label that said
UNALLOCATED SPACE.